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Jennifer Lynch, QC (Queen Censor), Chief Commissar of the Canadian "Human Rights" Commission, has had a rough couple of years. But, no doubt emboldened by her many five-star lunches in Geneva with leading "human rights" bodies from Sudan, Saudi Arabia et al, she's clamped the electrodes to Section 13 and is making a spirited effort to get it up and running again:
5.1 Definition of hatred and contempt - The Commission applies the restrictive definition of hatred and contempt established by the Supreme Court of Canada in the Taylor case. Applying this definition ensures that the exercise of the Commission’s mandate does not offend the Charter.
This means that in order to come within the ambit of section 13, the communication that is the subject of the complaint must be so excessive and extreme in nature that it suggests that a given race, sex, religion or other group identifiable in relation to one or more grounds in the CHRA is devoid of any redeeming qualities as human beings. If the message does not meet this threshold, it will not be found to come within the ambit of section 13, notwithstanding that the message is offensive, controversial, shocking or disgusting to some.
As Scaramouche notes, this is complete rubbish. By the time the Maclean's case was under way, Commissar Lynch's dress-up Nazis had long since flown the coop of any "restrictive definition". As I said in my testimony to Parliament:
Hatefinder Warman and his enablers at the commission abused the extremely narrow constitutional approval given to section 13 by the Supreme Court in the Taylor decision and instead turned it into a personal inquisition for himself and his pals.
That's what eventually got 'em into trouble. And their current enthusiasm for Taylor is no more than a tactical feint to prevent the Supreme Court reconsidering the issue in light of Hatefinder-General Warman & Co's all too predictable statist bender.
Kathy Shaidle makes another point - that the CHRC is now Canada's largest publisher of racist commentary: It's the one-stop shop for all your racist needs. To take another point I made to Parliament:
Let me take the most recent example of a section 13 conviction. The sole charge on which Marc Lemire was found guilty a month ago was for a post that appeared at his website, written by somebody else. That piece was read by a grand total of just eight people in the whole of Canada, which works out to 0.8 of a Canadian per province, or if you include territories, 0.6153 of a Canadian. And almost all those 0.6153s of a Canadian going to this website and reading this piece were Richard Warman and his fellow dress-up Nazis at the Human Rights Commission, salivating at the prospect of having found another witch to provide more bounty.
In other words, no one in Canada saw this post. No one in Canada read it. Nothing could be less “likely to expose” anyone to hatred or contempt than an unread post at an unread website. Yet Canadian taxpayers paid for Jennifer Lynch and the Nazi fetishists at the commission to investigate this unread bit of nothing for six years.
In the course of securing this itsy-bitsy single conviction, these psychologically disturbed employees of the Human Rights Commission wrote and distributed far more hate speech of their own.
By the way, Kathy is absolutely right to reprint one of the "hate poems" helpfully anthologized by the CHRC. Aside from the fact that the author should have been prosecuted for his appalling false rhymes, the notion that material deemed not only criminal but dangerous if printed on a private unread web site can be disseminated perfectly legally by a far more widely read government website exposes the lie on which Commissar Lynch's lavish sinecure rests - that, if exposed to this material, the moronic citizenry would be rampaging down the 401 from one pogrom to the next.
No, they wouldn't. It's wholly irrelevant to the Queen's peace, but it's vital to control-freak conceptions of state power. Underlying the barely veiled classist assumptions of Canada's Chief Censor is the one unyielding belief that you, a supposedly free citizen of a settled democracy, are a child, too stupid to exercise freedom for yourself. The central pillar of Trudeaupia - that a vast government apparatus is needed to mediate relations between designated sub-groups of the populace - is incompatible with liberty. Reject it, resist it, and, if that all sounds too much like hard work, at the very least apply for a grant to make a giant invisible banana to fly over CHRC headquarters.
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